Create new /home

[Juan Pablo]

i have three distros Debian, FC5 and Slackware on my box and now I want to have the same /home partition for all them. Right now all them have it's own folder inside root folder. I have a spare 7 GB (enough for me) spare partition for this. But I dont know how to merge them and keep all my setting stored in dot* folders.

I thought something about rsync but not sure.

If matters Debian has Gnome, Slackware have KDE, and Fedora Gnome.

[iwanabeguru]

I think is not a good idea. But it's your decision.

copy the contents of your home directory to the partition what you want use as home.
edit the /etc/fstab and mount the partition to the /home directory on the root filsystem and set this partition automatic mount on this partition.

[devils casper]

Hi Juan !!!

i disagree with iwanabeguru. i have separate Home partition and i think its the best way........ its common home for all six distros i have.

follow this tutorial for creating new /home


best of luck !

.... casper ....

[drl]

Hi.

I have worried about this and related issues for years. I have found inspiration in Maris Blais' innovation in Portable Unix Configuration.

A colleague and I have a sourceforge project to make this available is a general form, but we do not have anything ready for public consumption at this point. Our project aims at the peripatetic consultant who wishes to carry his software toolbox with him, and has worked, is working, and will work on different platforms (OS, hardware). Our design is does not merge configuration files, as you can see from Blais' description, but rather keeps them happily separate. The real magic lies in the simplicity -- it is the setting of the PATH variable based on architecture that makes it work.

Think of GNU's config.guess. On the system I using now, it returns i686-pc-linux-gnu. So that is used as a directory name under which all files that are peculiar to that system will be located. Other signatures produce other strings, so you can have several platforms in a single master hierarchy.

Our project provides a few scripts to cause this all to come into existence. In my prototype system I have the following platforms:

i686-pc-linux-gnu/
powerpc-apple-darwin7.9.0/
sparc-sun-solaris2.8/
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/

We've had to deal with issues like the structure (do we keep source in the tree, etc), names, license (GNU, BSD, etc), etc. My colleague has implemented much of it for his immediate testing, including on cygwin.

Regrettably I have no estimate for when we will be ready for a release, but you can read over Blais' description and possibly get something to use now from that.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl (20)

[iwanabeguru]

i have separate Home partition and i think its the best way........ its common home for all six distros i have.

I agree , this is the best way for home. i just think mixing some diferent distros home , it's not a good idea.

[Juan Pablo]

I'll maybe just lndir the documents and images folders to each home from the others, i think is the safest way.